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As others have posted, 24 oz of water is too much quantity for a tea light stove to heat, just as a 4 cylinder car can't be expected to haul a large load of freight. Also, a windscreen and the pot make a big difference, as menitoned already. Two things I did not see anyone bring up: The surface on which the stove sits and the distance between the stove and pot.

I use a piece of foil-wrapped corrugated cardboard under alcohol stoves to both protect the surface and to insulate the stove from it. The smaller the stove and quantity of alcohol, the more the surface can affect the stove's perfomance. Think of any cold rock, metal table top, or a cement floor as a giant heat sink.

Also, there are optimal distances for getting the most heat transferred from a stove to pot. Make sure your flame is reaching the bottom of your pot, but not traveling up the side and around it. You should be able to find a good bit written about this.

I think you said you used isopropyl alcohol. It may not throw quite as many btu's as ethanol or methanol, but the form of alcohol is probably your biggest issue. If you are using common rubbing alcohol, it is normally 70% alcohol and 30% water. If your alky is from the "Dollar Store," it may be only 50% strength, in which case I'm a bit surprised you could get it to light. If you are in a drug store (rather than convenience store), you probably can find 90% isopropyl. It burns hotter and more easily, but isopropyl does throw a lot of soot and stinks.

To test gear, I have buried my alcohol bottle in a snow bank overnight, using that fuel to fire a tealight stove, boiling about 12 oz of water in a beer can pot. This could have been 10 years ago, so I don't remember the time, but IIRC, it was about 17 degrees outside, the tap water was very cold, and I just stuck the stove, windscreen and all, just outside my back door.

I also put two candle cups together, much like some of the soda can stoves. I have not tested one of these against an open cup to see how much this helps.

There was a gal who couldn't get Esbit to boil water in her back yard. With some questioning, we (on another list) found out she not only used no windscreen, she was using a Revereware kitchen pot. A lot of factors come into play when we talk gear.

Regards,

CamperMom